Copenhagen has changed dramatically over the 25 years I’ve lived here, the last 15 of those right in the heart of it’s traditional red light district Vesterbro, now a trendy bohemian hot-spot. Copenhagen used to be a city in black and white, seedy, crumbling, and provincial, but through the ‘90s and into the new millennium it has bounced back as a much more international micro-metropolis with a whole new variety in its color scheme.
I don’t miss the provincial-ness of the ‘80s at all, but I do tend to miss the rough edges and the seediness from back when whole parts of the inner city looked like crumbling backdrops of a B&W punk documentary with a Sort Sol soundtrack…
But we have paid a high price for that gentrification. Copenhagen has lost its cheap apartments, its working class-population, its blue collar bars/coffee shops, its backyard workshops, its good, ol’ boys drinking beer on the door-steps, its restaurants allowing smoking after your meal, and a lot of the old tolerance, as the city has been turned into Big Mother Wallpaper Visitation Zone.
We've paid a high price for gentrification.
